<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<meta charset="UTF-8">
<title>Hand In Hateful Hand, Walking Through Hell by Her_Madjesty</title>
<style type="text/css">

body { background-color: #ffffff; }
.CI {
text-align:center;
margin-top:0px;
margin-bottom:0px;
padding:0px;
}
.center   {text-align: center;}
.cover    {text-align: center;}
.full     {width: 100%; }
.quarter  {width: 25%; }
.smcap    {font-variant: small-caps;}
.u        {text-decoration: underline;}
.bold     {font-weight: bold;}
</style>
</head>
<body>
<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/28256466">Hand In Hateful Hand, Walking Through Hell</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/Her_Madjesty/pseuds/Her_Madjesty'>Her_Madjesty</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>Twelve Days of Christmas - 2020 [11]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Much Ado About Nothing (1993)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Alternate Universe - Pacific Rim Fusion, F/M, Gen, Style Challenge</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-12-23</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-12-23</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-20 12:07:01</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>1,690</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/28256466</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/Her_Madjesty/pseuds/Her_Madjesty</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>He is visiting San Francisco on the behest of his half-brother when the beast makes its way out of the water.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Hero/Don John (Much Ado About Nothing)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>Twelve Days of Christmas - 2020 [11]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/series/2037376</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>9</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>12</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>Hand In Hateful Hand, Walking Through Hell</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>On the eleventh day of Christmas, an increasingly-harried writer gives to thee...a teaser fic!</p><p>That's not a joke; this is not the fic I intended to post today. The fic I intended to post was much, much longer, but I woke up, found that I hated the first several thousand words, and unofficially scrapped it. Instead, you're getting a shorter piece in the same vein that hints at a piece that I intend to write up in 2021, because I feel like I've cheated to get us here. Apologies, with that in mind, for running thirty minutes late with posting - I know time zones may make me on time for some of you, but it's 12:30am where I'm at. For someone so bad with deadlines, I was so pleased to hold up until this point, lol.</p><p>Now, an administrative note: this fic is written in the style of a Chaucerian format as proposed by anghraine on Tumblr. Each of the seven sections is composed of seven sentences, as proposed in the original challenge, issued <a href="https://anghraine.tumblr.com/post/145320294168/chaucer-meme">here</a>. That said, I cheated <em> a little <em> because there are only so many semi-colons and em-dashes I can use to get my point across.</em></em></p><p> </p><p>  <em><br/><em>One more posting until Christmas, folks! I will see you all, with that in mind, on the 24th/25th! I hope you're all doing well and enjoying (safe) festivities wherever you are in the world. All of you commenters and readers and kudo-ers have made this month such a joy - way to send 2020 out with a bang, you absolute delights.</em><br/></em></p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p class="western">I. Trespasser</p><p class="western"> </p><p class="western">He is visiting San Francisco on the behest of his half-brother when the beast makes its way out of the water. It is – unspeakable; water drips from the ax that rests in its forehead at the same speed as its blue blood, which soaks into the shoreline and leaves countless gasping for breath, even long after armed forces from several different nations come together to put the creature down.</p><p class="western">Don John does not consider himself to be a particularly religious man (even though his mother bore a rosary around her wrist while she worked and his father, when he acknowledged him, forced him to attend mass on Wednesdays and Sundays until he was able to leave home). When he looks up at the beast that will someday be called Trespasser, though, he feels the first call – the fiercest call – to pray.</p><p class="western">The feeling – passes; three cities fall.</p><p class="western">And Don John remembers:</p><p class="western">Above all else, even monsters tearing out of the ocean or control of his life rapidly slipping out of his hands, he is a soldier; he is meant to fight and bite and bleed until there’s nothing left in him to give.</p><p class="western">So when Trespasser lies dead on the beaches of Oakland, he calls his half-brother, scavenges debris from the ruins of an apartment building, and makes his way to the nearest military recruiter to see what kind of work this new world has for him.</p><p class="western"> </p><p class="western">II. Ragnarok</p><p class="western">Within a year of that first attack, two more kaiju appear out of what becomes known as the Breach – and Don John finds himself elevated through the ranks of the fast-growing Pan Pacific Defense Corps.</p><p class="western">Around him, the world flickers in shades of blue. Blue blood from the kaiju drips across all of the Pacific shores; his half-brother’s company loses half of its stock in a wave of blue terror; Don Pedro ends up calling his chickens into roost and reaching out to an old friend for support to keep what staff he can onboard.</p><p class="western">Don John checks in with his half-brother twice a year. He hears talk of the company’s dealings with Leonato of Messina and the Padua branch; hears rumors of some manner of business arrangement that sees not only the two companies band together but a marriage spin out between two of the related parties.</p><p class="western">He doesn’t care. Don John spends his days alternating between officer’s training and work alongside a German called Gottlieb who picks at his brain as he crafts blueprints for the devices that will one day save them all; experiments with a prototype designed to the measurements of his own head; presses the button that sends him spinning into the first Drift not two hours before Tokyo shakes and Ragnarok runs on six legs towards the near-defenseless shore.</p><p class="western"> </p><p class="western">III. Scissure</p><p class="western">Records of the first Drift are redacted before their ink ever dries.</p><p class="western">Don John wakes from hazy memories – an island, summer heat, his mother’s laugh, a white linen dress – to find himself in the hospital and blind in one eye.</p><p class="western">The doctors tell him it will pass; that he will be back on his feet in no time.</p><p class="western">Gottlieb does not apologize, but Don John does not want him to.</p><p class="western">After his release, the two of them walk through the Lima Shatterdome in silence, listening to the gossip starting to pop up around them: news of developments in Alaska on a shoreline wall; the circulation of unburnt coffee grounds in the mess; the leggy girl brought in from Italy whose skill with languages – and resource management – is meant to help R&amp;D better connect with its international peers.</p><p class="western">None of it registers.</p><p class="western">Instead, as the fourth kaiju rises from the Breach and rages against Australia – and is destroyed, a day later, in a nuclear missile attack – Don John marches Gottlieb towards his lab; towards the scrap metal PONS set still sitting on Gottlieb’s desk; towards the dried outline of blood that remains from their first experiment and bids him to keep working.</p><p class="western">IV. Hundun</p><p class="western">The Pan Pacific Defense Corps deploys the first of its Jaegers on the second day of Hundun’s rampage against Manila.</p><p class="western">Don John is not at the helm.</p><p class="western">He spends the day in central control, instead, watching the view screen installed on the Jaeger’s head as Hundun turns, snarls, and lunges towards the walking junk heap they’re all relying on for protection.</p><p class="western">The fight – goes well, all things considered; while Brawler Yukon takes significant damage, none of its is catastrophic, and its pilots maintain their neural link for the whole of the fight, even with Hundun’s claws start to dig into the Jaeger’s central main frame.</p><p class="western">(And that, John knows, is the real problem – not the kaiju or the damage or even Blue Tide with all of the diseases it brings with it. It is the pilots, plural; the need for more than one mind to bridge the gap within the Jaeger; to give the metal the soul it needs to walk and, more importantly fight.</p><p class="western">It is the stuttering of his own mind; the quiet part of him that reels back from in mortification at the thought of being known; at that empty feeling he gets staring at the PONS set with his one good eye, wondering what it feels like for a Jaeger to shake beneath his feet and to scream with all of his soul.)</p><p class="western">V. Onibaba</p><p class="western">The Jaegers grow stronger, sleeker, more advanced. Gottlieb leaves Lima for Tokyo and a growing R&amp;D department and demands that the upper brass assigned Don John to go with him – a security detail for one of the best computer scientists, best mathematicians affiliated with the PPDC’s “gaggle of wanton meatheads”.</p><p class="western">And so John does – not for friendship or even for the way Gottlieb knows his coffee order and he knows his, but for, he claims, “a fucking change of view.”</p><p class="western">It is Toyko, though, where a problem arises.</p><p class="western">Onibaba rises and falls beneath Coyote Tango’s unrelenting fists. One of the pilots – Stacker Pentecost – brings a young girl back to the Shatterdome and refuses to release her to anyone, no matter how loudly the upper brass complains.</p><p class="western">On the day John meets her – a small thing, her eyes downcast but a wildness to her, too, that even his hard heart can’t begrudge – she is walking hand in hand with Pentecoast through the Jaeger’s docking bay; and at her side, clutching the free hand that reaches up and up and up –</p><p class="western">is a woman he never thought he’d see again.</p><p class="western">VI. Knifehead</p><p class="western">Hero Rossi is both a linguist and head of PPDC Japan’s Resource Management department; a transplant, like him, out of both Italy and Lima.</p><p class="western">She is –</p><p class="western">a problem.</p><p class="western">Because John knows her; knows her too well, in fact, despite the years that have passed since he last saw her; she is every memory he doesn’t want of a summer spent in Messina with his half-brother; a year spent overlooked and replaced by a man named Claudio; a summer where freedom, recognition, <em>something</em> was almost in his grasp and yet disappeared in a haze of vengeance and death and guilt, guilt, guilt.</p><p class="western">And she looks at him in that crowded docking bay, a child’s hand in hers. And she spots him.</p><p class="western">And Don John –</p><p class="western">does not back away.</p><p class="western">Because there is Gottlieb, too, nudging the back of his knee with his cane; there is the world shuddering while, above their heads, an alarm starts to blare; there is the voice of the man in central control reporting a kaiju sighting just off of the Alaskan coast and the deployment of the Jaegers in that area (and there is Knifehead tearing apart a Jaegar called Gispy Danger, marking the first of the PPDC’s losing steps in this long and relentless war.)</p><p class="western">VII. Mutavore</p><p class="western">He goes about the next two months convinced that he will never see her again, then the next two weeks convinced – and relieved in the belief – that his Drift-addled brain may have hallucinated her.</p><p class="western">He is wrong.</p><p class="western">It is a rainy evening in Tokyo; the lights above his head are unrelenting, unforgiving, all-seeing, and he walks without an umbrella, better to feel something cool against his back in the middle of this summer heatwave –</p><p class="western">when the sirens start to blare.</p><p class="western">And he knows those sirens like he knows the thundering of his own heart; knows the location of every bunker in this too-crowded city; knows that he is too far away to make it into one before the doors swing shut and lock him out to face this newest beast alone.</p><p class="western">But John runs anyway.</p><p class="western">By the time he arrives at one of the entrances, the bunker is nearly full; the doors are already sliding closed while, towards the shoreline, a hooked goliath, codename Mutavore, rips into those few shipping vessels that haven’t given up the business of the ocean just yet.</p><p class="western">And behind him in the crowd, he can hear a familiar voice calling out, can hear a child crying, can hear the shouts of a woman who has shouted in that tone before but who, despite it all, never directed those shouts at him.</p><p class="western"> </p><p class="western"> </p><p class="western"> </p><p class="western"> </p><p class="western"> </p><p class="western"> </p><p class="western">(And he stops.</p><p class="western">And he turns back.</p><p class="western">And despite every traitorous, malevolent beat of his heart, there is Hero with Stacker Pentecost’s child on her hip and tears in her eyes. And she spots him through the crowd, keeps rushing forward, all but crashes into him as the doors to the bunker continue to close in front of them.</p><p class="western">And Don John comes to take the child in his hands.</p><p class="western">He passes her to the nearest rusher-by, catches Hero as she presses herself against his chest; listens as the child – Mako, her name is Mako – screams Hero’s name even as the bunker doors snap shut.</p><p class="western">And Hero looks at him, looks at him properly with tears and rain on her cheeks while Mutavore screams above their heads; looks at him and grips him tight and presses him against the nearest wall; and he brings his arms up and around her and braces as the city shakes around them;</p><p class="western">And –</p><p class="western">And –</p><p class="western">And –)</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Let me know what you thought! Apologies for the hyper-stylism; you can blame the aforementioned challenge issued <a href="https://anghraine.tumblr.com/post/145320294168/chaucer-meme">here</a>. I look forward to sharing a more fleshed-out piece in this same universe with you come the new year!</p><p>Edit, 4/10/21: I'm now on Twitter! Come and find me and my various other platforms <a href="https://twitter.com/HMadjesty">here.</a></p></blockquote></div></div>
</body>
</html>